IPv6 solves mAAAAny issues. DNS issues causes MAAAAny more. I dAAAAbble in v6 here AAAAnd there AAAAnd the situAAAAtion is still pretty dire.

The question is, will people get the joke?

Only people that could have anything approaching a opinion about ipv6 worth listening to.

Guy who manages a two-dozen site v6 network with tens of thousands of clients here. What issues are you referring to?

Yeah if you want to make a cname for yourself in this field you'll have to bring your AAA game.

*AAAA

They answered that question 6 times in their comment.

If you can't access IPv6 enabled sites, you can't access Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, or Netflix, who all enabled IPv6 permanently in 2012[1]. According to [2], around a third of US has IPv6 connectivity. If AAAA records constitute some big problem, it's not well known.

1. http://www.worldipv6launch.org/participants/?q=1

2. https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html#tab=per-...

Thats not how it works, if you only have IPv4, AAAA records have no effect. Google et all continue to work via IPv4.

I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say "Thats not how it works".

I was referring to people with broken IPv6 setups, mostly Teredo and 6to4 (old Mac OS X versions), for whom IPv4 worked but IPv6 was not actually routable. At the time, publishing AAAA records would lock out all of those users.

> If you can't access IPv6 enabled sites, you can't access Google

He was referring to your lack of qualification in the above. An IPv4 user can indeed access Google, which is an IPv6 enabled site.

Oh, I see now. You're reading "Having IPv6 access is a necessary for accessing Google". What I meant was "If the presence of AAAA records means you can't access a site, then you can't access Google".

A user who only has IPv4 connectivity relies on their software recognizing this when accessing an IPv6 enabled site. Software's failure to do so is one of the main reasons for the slow rollout of IPv6.

Very hAAAArd to rAAAed - even having troubling remembering whAAAt you just sAAAAid...

IPV6 is all well and good, but I am not optimistic about it. Why should a university deploy it, and introduce all sorts of new problems? Mine hasn't. And I don't blame them.

No, I think that our future is isolated carrier-grade NAT, connecting to cloud services exclusively. And that makes me sad.

I had to disable ipv6 on my Linode, because Clouldflare, Google, and Facebook do not seem to trust any ipv6 traffic coming from Linode. Only using ipv4 has fixed everything.

And, as for ip4 blocks being obsolete, I still think it's wrong to sell them off. Universities were endowed with these. If they don't have a use for them, they should make them available for someone who does. Not just sell them to be used for some corporation's infrastructure.

I hate how so many people on hackernews seem to think that not selling these ipv4 addresses is a "waste". People are only looking at this in purely financial terms. I consider it to be wasteful to sell them to Microsoft or Amazon or whatever. No matter how much money they offer. Universities are supposed to use the gifts they are given to try to better society.

Aren't these ip addresses going to just be used for things like NAT traversal? Why doesn't MIT make them available for some non profit to offer that service as a public utility?

If a flight school has an operating runway and hanger, should they just make all their students use flight simulators and demolish their runway? Should an agricultural school sell off their farmland to real estate developers? If their students really weren't benefiting from their property, then they should donate it to some organization that could carry on the spirit of what they were supposed to be doing with it.

> Why should a university deploy it, and introduce all sorts of new problems? Mine hasn't. And I don't blame them.

If your university doesn't have a lot more demand for IP addresses then yeah -- it makes sense that they'd just hold on to their network space, continue to NAT their DHCP pools and keep doing what they're doing. That's not an indictment of IPv6, it just means that the work to deploy IPv6 doesn't provide any benefits to them. However, newcomers and networks that foresee expansion can't just "stay the course" -- there just isn't enough IPv4 for them -- and do need to bite the IPv6 bullet.

Deploying IPv6 does indeed require work in terms of management (all tools that assume the length/format of an IP address need to be updated, netadmins need to learn and deploy RA guard and friends) and your network silicon needs to do IPv6 in the fastpath -- but even with all these pain points, carrier-grade NAT'ing IPv4 is nevertheless more painful, expensive, and slow.

Forward-thinking network operators have been taking advantage of the LTE and DOCSIS 3 transitions to enable native IPv6 everywhere, and Facebook is moving to IPv6-only infrastructure -- and it's paid off! About 80% of network traffic (to Akamai) from T-Mobile and Verizon is IPv6 (from Comcast it's lower -- around 50%): https://www.akamai.com/uk/en/our-thinking/state-of-the-inter...

The future is IPv6 -- it's just not quite equally distributed yet.

>If they don't have a use for them, they should make them available for someone who does. Not just sell them to be used for some corporation's infrastructure.

Isn't selling them off to someone who will pay money for them pretty much the definition of making them available for someone who has a use for them?

It's not like you can't buy an IPv4 address if you want one because Amazon and Google own them all.

We just have this situation where a few universities, the US DoD, and a handful of corporations own a disproportionate number of IP addresses because they were early to the game. They all got cheap IPv4 addresses. So HP owns two /8 addresses while Google does not.

I'm not seeing a situation where donating millions of IPv4 addresses to someone is going to improve society relative to Amazon forking over a bunch of dollars to a university.

I guess it's a matter of opinion. If a university had some prime real estate, they could sell it to the highest bidder so that they could build a shopping mall, or they could donate it to a non-profit that would improve society in some way, thereby fulfilling their mission, to improve society. Or they could just cash out and getting more money could arguably improve society in a less tangible, less measurable way.

Universities are uniquely positioned to not be constrained by market forces. Part of the reason that universities get privileged access to things, is because they are seen as working in the public interest. Government and business and wealthy donors throw money at universities, because they want to see innovation and public good come from it.

Maybe that's idealistic of me, and universities are just a kind of business, and only that. MIT already gives the public free hosting, with an externally routable, unfirewalled ip4 or ip6 address, to anyone who comes on campus. I don't think any other universities in the world do that. And MIT does this at great expense. (this is how Aaron Schwarz was able to download so much of JSTOR)

It makes no financial sense for MIT to be doing this. Perhaps they should lock down their network as much as possible, and probably outsource it's management.

That hasn't been completely true for a few years. If you just walk onto campus with a wireless device and use the public network (the one that doesn't require authentication) you get a 10.x.x.x address behind a NAT and it has some firewall restrictions. (They're pretty light; it's mostly to keep out some network attacks.) I think you do still get a public address if you plug into an Ethernet port, and you may get one if you use the MIT SECURE wireless network.

MIT's network policies are not purely about what makes financial sense. The Institute was one of the birthplaces of the internet, and they see the ongoing development of it as one of their core missions. MIT has a close relationship with W3C, which is located a stone's throw away. Their network is multi-homed to the max; I think they peer with ALL the backbone providers that operate in the US. The school has ludicrous amounts of internet bandwidth; I think it's now measured in terabits per second. After all, they have to be able to cope with thousands of students watching Netflix along with all the research!

And just in case there is a REAL internet collapse... they have an emergency info site at mit.NET that is hosted far away from the campus. That would let them get some information out even if Cambridge were wiped off the map and all the name servers for .edu were to fail.

On Linode, were you using the default single IPv6 address, or did you request a prefix? I found that the default address was in a blacklisted /64, and couldn't send email without it getting bounced or blackholed. Once I got my own /64, the problems went away (but DKIM+SPF was also mandatory).

We really need to just pick a date and turn off ipv4 because its the only way to make this guy change.

It's not me that's fixated on ipv4. I would love ipv6. But why aren't ISPs providing it? Why aren't universities and other large organizations switching to it by default?

ISPs don't care. They would rather everyone just use carrier-grade NAT.

Because someone works at those universities or ISPs who is making the same argument you're making. If enough of you all throw your hands in the air and say 'not enough people are doing it' then there will never be enough people doing it. At some point someone needs to point a (metaphorical) gun at your heads and make you all do it or else.

In the meantime, you should feel bad every time you make this argument because you're helping to make the world worse and enabling everyone else to just kick the can down the road.

I've tried to run IPv6 on my Comcast connection. Unsurprisingly, Comcast doesn't get the point of IPv6. They allocate one single IPv6 address to my router. That's right, ONE. LOUSY. ADDRESS.

This seems to be a "feature" of owning your own modem rather than renting one of theirs. I hesitate to even try to get this fixed via their tech support.

I guess if I want IPv6 connectivity, I'm either going to have to get a tunnel from Hurricane Electric (SIXXS is shutting down), or carve out some IPv6 space from my Linode and tunnel it to my home network.

Actually, Comcast supports DHCP prefix delegation (I'm led to believe everywhere, but it works at my home anyway), which is pretty much the Right Thing in this space. Your default DHCPv6 request is from a single client and it returns a single IP, as expected. And you can then do NAT across that if you want, which is what their default routers do.

But if you want a subnet, you can make a second DHCPv6 request with prefix delegation metadata, and the server will establish a route for a full /64 subnet to your existing IP and return it to you. Then you can hand these out however you want (though they won't give you bigger than a /64 so you can do internal subnet routing).

The only annoyance is that none of the existing Linux distros support this yet as part of their network client integration, so you have to script it yourself around dhclient (see the -P argument), which is a little hairy if you want to get the hooks right (I punted and just did it once manually and left dhclient running).

UPDATE: I now have IPv6 connectivity via my shiny new EdgeRouter POE. Now I just have to poke a few holes in the firewall where appropriate (now that I've set drop-by-default rules).

Getting it to work with the ER-POE was non-intuitive but not as bad as I was expecting. I'm even getting a /60...

I suspect most people don't use a Linux box as their router (with the obvious exception of router distros and embedded Linux on routers).

Most people will read this, I think, and think a Linux client won't accept a V6 from a router that has obtained it's delegation via DHCP-PD..

>The only annoyance is that none of the existing Linux distros support this yet as part of their network client integration, so you have to script it yourself around dhclient (see the -P argument), which is a little hairy if you want to get the hooks right (I punted and just did it once manually and left dhclient running).

I think OpenWRT has all you need for this. At least I think that's exactly what I did with my ISP config on my own router just with the LuCi web interface.

Yep, same with Cox in my area. I'm running Sophos UTM Home which supports prefix delegation, I'm sure there are others that are plug and play as well.

Linux doesn't support it? My Comcast router has a /64 given to it by Comcast and all my linux boxes connected to it work like a charm.. although I haven't been able to get my dd-wrt router to pass them on yet.

Linux supports it just fine, you have to do the integration on your own. If you want to use the distro-provided DHCP setup, you need to work out the NetworkManager hooks on your own to add the PD client at the right spots.

Comcast will give out up to a /60 for residential if you hint for it in DHCPv6-PD.

That doesn't sound correct. Are you absolutely sure you aren't also getting a prefix delegation thru DHCPv6? That's currently the common way to provide IPv6 connectivity currently for residential users.

From what I remember hearing, Comcast was giving /60s thru PD.

No, I don't get a prefix. No /60, no /64, not even a /120, just one single address. A /128. Maybe I should jump on their forums and raise a fuss. I'm not at all confident that calling tech support would get me to someone who even had a clue what IPv6 is.

Just to be sure, with a routed network being aimed at your house, you'll actually receive two subnets (well, a single address in one subnet, and a whole second subnet). You need to use DHCP-PD or similar to make use of it.

The /128 sounds perfectly normal, and is used as a "point to point" link between the ISP and your modem. Over this, DHCP prefix delegation typically gives you a whole second subnet of /60 or so. If your modem isn't handling DHCP-PD, then all your see is 1 measly address even though they've likely allocated and pushed 295,147,905,179,352,825,856 addresses to you.

Hmmm, maybe I should revisit this. I first tried it a year or so ago with pfSense on a virtual machine. Between the IPv6 issues and generally poor performance (long story), I went back to my IPv4-only configuration with DD-WRT on a D-Link DIR-825.

I'm now using a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter POE, and maybe I should give it another shot. I'm not convinced I'll actually get a prefix from Comcast, though.

It may differ by region, but in the SF Bay Area I've been getting a /60 from Comcast residential for a few years now using a MikroTik router. See here: http://i.imgur.com/2mrRk01.png

The edge router can do DHCP-PD, but it needs some configuration for it to do it, there's lots of info on the Ubuiquiti forums about it. Good luck!

Comcast has a decent ipv6 technology group (by necessity - they were an early adopter/innovator of carrier-grade v6 as they have more CPE to address than can be fit into 10/8). If you ever become interested in resolving this you may want to dig through http://www.comcast6.net and see if you can find a direct contact to work with.

I don't have any contacts myself, I'm just a customer and interested observer.

I can confirm that, my home network is currently routing a /60 from Comcast.

FTR, I don't get a prefix from them, either.

I tunnel all traffic through Comcast via a VPN, though, because I consider them a hostile network, so I don't especially care.

Not necessarily your situation -- but I noticed this from Time Warner as well and it turned out to be my old Airport Extreme hardware. Even with the latest firmware it wouldn't receive the delegated range. As soon as I upgraded to the latest model, it properly received a delegated range from TWC without me doing anything else. Just saying, there is a lot of reason to hate cable companies, but it's not always their fault :)

That's surprising, in Denver Comcast gives my Time Capsule a /64 (and has for years, we were one of the earlier areas to get v6 service from them). Doubly surprising since the v6 RFCs all but forbid giving out less than a /64, and Comcast is a leader rather than follower of v6 technology. I wonder if the modem manufacturer is at fault instead.

I regularly ssh straight into to my suspended WoL Macbook over v6, and never went out of my way to set up a single bit of it. A half dozen new technologies working perfectly out of the box!

"carve out some IPv6 space from my Linode and tunnel it to my home network."

I'm planning on doing exactly this using openvpn as my transport (because I already have an extensive ipv4 openvpn system). Has anyone tried it? I'm not interested so much in how to do it, which I think I know, but in anecdotes along the lines of "it makes openvpn crash" or "linode told me I was being abusive and cut me off" or whatever.

I've had ipv6 for decades I guess. I even got one of the Hurricane Electric "sage" tee shirts last decade. But when sixxs goes down I lose ipv6 connectivity for the first time since the DSL days at the turn of the century.

I tunnel all of my traffic through my Linode. I had to disable ipv6, because I was getting constant captcha checks from facebook, cloudflare, and google. No matter how many different ipv6 addresses I tried, traffic is always marked as suspicious. As soon as I disabled ipv6, everything went smoothly.

This sounds like CloudFlare etc have just blacklisted hosting provider IPv6 blocks, as there a real easy way to get millions of "clean" IPs priced by the hour.

CloudFlare etc certainly dont do this with SiXXS IPv6 addresses, or any traditional residential provider I'm aware of.

Well, I'd love to use ipv6. In fact, I can't wait. But, what am I supposed to do?

  * T-mobile: ipv4  
  * Office: ipv4  
  * Verizon: ipv4  
  * University: ipv4
  * Linode: ipv6 (but flagged as hostile)

Google will not just show me captchas, but will deactivate accounts if I use some of their apis. I had to reverify several accounts when I've tried using ipv6.

I'm not being backward about ipv4, I'm really not. But we're in denial about the fact that we still live in an ipv4 world. And I don't like seeing the last vestiges of non-profit ipv4 address space being liquidated.

T-Mobile stopped handing out IPv4 addresses to handsets on iOS 10 -- IPv6 Only.

Yeah, T-Mo is IPv6 on smartphones such as Android/iPhone.

I route all of my mobile traffic through an older Android device that only connects to their 3G network. Maybe that's why...

You should be able to get a /56 or /60 from them using DHCPV6-PD.

I have Comcast and get a range. It may be a regional thing or your setup is just wonky.

Granted, I have business class so that I don't violate their ToS by hosting stuff and to get a dedicated IP.

Rogers in Canada gives /64, which is lovely.

My old ISP gave me a /64 and it was anything but lovely. It's too small to break up into subnets, and they were unable to give anything larger.

This caused me to switch ISP's and now I have a static /48. That's much nicer.

I get a /60 from Comcast in Chicago.

> Even your comment about streaming, seems like mainly nostalgia vs reality as you kind of admit. Any modern streaming infrastructure works from behind a NAT since most people are behind one these days.

If I tried streaming a conference on youtube, facebook, or periscope, my stream could be muted or stopped because someone plays copyrighted music or something.